According to Arabicnews.com, "The Saudi Arabian minister of defense, prince Sultan
Bin Abdul Aziz," says that what "Israel is doing is a violation to international norms and
resolutions, while it Israel is carrying out the ugliest crimes in the life of humanity and therefore
the whole world should take a united position towards this barbaric onslaught."

Let's see. In the "life of humanity" we've had death camps. Can't recall hearing about
Israeli death camps where they slaughter Palestinians.

In the "life of humanity" we've had the deliberate starvation of millions of freeholding
kulaks in Ukraine by Stalin's government. But I've never heard of any Israeli campaign to starve
Palestinians.

In the "life of humanity" we've had Serbs and Croats driving out their native-born
citizens who have suddenly been declared "foreigners" in programs of ethnic cleansing. But the
Israelis have not been expelling West Bank and Gaza Strip residents.

In the "life of humanity" we've had Hutus take machetes and slaughter men, women, and
children of the Tutsi tribe in an effort to exterminate them completely.

We do have that sort of thing going on in Israel -- but it's being done by Palestinians
against Israelis, where suicide bombers have killed babies in strollers, guests at a bar mitzvah,
elderly people out shopping for food, solely for the "crime" of being Jews in the land that
everyone on God's green Earth knows is the homeland of the Jewish people and has been since
long before the Arabic language was ever spoken on that soil.

But the Saudi minister of defense -- all of whose weapons come from the United States
-- says that "Israel is carrying out the ugliest crimes in the life of humanity."

Saudi Arabia is our "friend."

Saudi Arabia gives special treatment to the families of suicide bombers when they come
on pilgrimage to Mecca.

How is that different from Saddam's payment of blood money -- ten thousand dollars to
the families of suicide bombers?

And how does that square with President Bush's statement that any nation that harbors or
aids or supports terrorism is our enemy in this war?

Palestinians have been offered many chances to have peace and a sovereign nation, but
they have refused those chances because they don't want anything less than all the land of
Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. And they wouldn't mind having all the
Jews' dead bodies to carpet that land for them when they take it back.

What the Palestinians have shown is race hatred and a program of genocide. But
throughout this process, they have constantly accused Israel of precisely the things that the
Palestinians are doing.

When Palestinians slaughter civilians, they accuse Israelis of slaughtering civilians.

When Palestinians plan genocide against Jews, they introduce resolutions in the U.N.
declaring Zionism to be a form of genocide.

And the Arab world supports the Palestinian program.

My question is: What happened to all our resolution after we discovered Hitler's hideous
attempt at genocide? Never again! we cried.

But it happened again in Bosnia, and we did nothing. In Rwanda, too, and we did
nothing.

And it's happening today in Canaan, with Palestinians carrying out a genocidal assault
against Jews. President Bush had the decency to stop trying to keep Sharon from protecting his
own people -- but the American press and the American Left are still blaming America and
Israel for the crimes of Palestinians.

There were alternatives, you know. Peaceful demonstrations, strikes, non-cooperation --
the tools Gandhi used to win Indian independence -- would have worked on the Israeli
conscience and the Palestinians would have had a state long ago (as pointed out by NYTimes
columnist Tom Friedman).

But they don't want a state, they want a victory.

And so the only thing that will stop them is not negotiation, but utter and absolute defeat.

We seem grimly determined not to remember any of the lessons of World War II.

So likewise the Western nations, along with the peace-loving majority of the Israeli
people, have tried for thirty years to appease Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian terrorists by
giving them concession after concession.

We now know that whenever the British appeased Hitler, he became furious, because
they were depriving him of the war he craved so much.

Apparently, Yasser Arafat feels the same way.

*

A group of forty pro-Palestinian foreigners got inside Arafat's headquarters on Sunday,
and most of them have stayed, apparently to create a human shield, so that if Israel does storm his
office, there will be plenty of dead bodies of "non-combatants" to create hideously bad press for
Israel.

I don't think they realized what they were confessing about Arafat and Israel by taking
that action.

We Westerners are surprised and outraged when Israeli action kills civilians because we
expect better of them. We know that they recognize our standards of civilized behavior and we
are upset when it even appears that they haven't followed them.

Those foreign supporters of Arafat are counting on that. That's what they are offering to
die for -- the outrage of the world, and of Israeli public opinion, if it can be made to seem that
Israel killed noncombatants.

But nobody expects civilized behavior from Muslim Arabs. After all these years of
terrorism by people who supposedly serve Allah and obey the Qur'an, we have been trained to
accept this as "business as usual."

Nobody is stupid enough to go over to Israel and stand around among crowds of Jews as a
human shield daring a Muslim suicide bomber to come and blow them up -- because the world
press wouldn't be shocked and outraged when it happened.

That is one of the ghastly side effects of what the Muslim people have been doing to
themselves. The world already regards them as uncivilized barbarians -- even their supporters!
Even those who argue in favor of their cause already hold them to the lowest of all possible
standards and believe them incapable of any better behavior.

No one is surprised any more when Palestinians murder babies and old women, even
though their survival as human beings is not being threatened by any enemy. But even the
Palestinians and their supporters expect that Israelis will act like civilized people even as they
fight for their very lives.

If I were a Muslim, in or out of the Arab world, I would be horrified and ashamed that
this is how even their friends see Muslims now.

*

I'm not a Muslim, of course, but I'm a Christian who believed for many years that Israel
had to perform the experiment and give the West Bank Palestinians the self-government that
Jordan had refused to give them.

Well, Israel did it. Arafat was given the reins of government.

We've seen now what he does when he has power.

I believe the Israeli obligation is completely fulfilled. They have done everything that
anyone could rationally expect them to do to bring peace.

On Fox News Monday morning I heard a pro-Palestinian DJ from some radio station say,
"I don't know why they don't just give them back their land. That's all they want."

What an odd thing to say. Because, in fact, that statement could be made in favor of
Israel, as well. Why don't the Palestinians just let them live in peace on land that is historically
their own, from which they were expelled by a foreign conqueror? That's all they want.

*

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian terrorist organizations have now declared that
American citizens throughout the world are legitimate targets of murder and maiming.

That means your family and mine. Our children at school or at McDonald's or at soccer
practice. Our elderly parents at the grocery store.

Please, let's not hear any more nonsense about appeasing these people. They have a taste
for murder now. They like it. They're proud of it. And if their murders end up getting them
what they want, why in the world do you think they would stop?

Instead, they would be imitated by every other group that thought they had a grievance
against us.

Murdering civilians cannot be allowed to succeed, in Israel or anywhere else, because if it
does lead to victory, it will become the main weapon of war used against us by everyone who
thinks they have something to gain by attacking us.

If we support Israel now, and act decisively to crush terrorism wherever it is supported,
we will, in the long run, be saving American lives.

But if we appease terrorism in Israel, we are, in the long run, encouraging the murder of
American civilians in the future.

Civilization itself is at stake. This is not an alarmist thing to say, it's a simple and
obvious fact. Even more obviously than in 1939, civilization is at stake.

And we're still wringing our hands and telling Ariel Sharon to show "restraint" in his
defense of his people against monsters.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.